Thursday, April 30, 2009

Contents, all illustrated by Edward Gorey:Introduction: The Castle of Terror by Henry Mazzeo The Lonesome Place by August Derleth In the Vault by H. P. Lovecraft The Man Who Collected Poe by Robert Bloch Where Angels Fear by Manly Wade Wellman Lot No. 249 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Haunted Dolls’ House by M. R. James The Open Door by Mrs. Oliphant Thus I Refute Beelzy by John Collier Levitation by Joseph Payne Brennan The Ghostly Rental by Henry James The Face by E. F. Benson The Whistling Room by William Hope Hodgson The Grey Ones by J. B. Priestley The Stolen Body by H. G. Wells The Red Lodge by H. Russell Wakefield The Visiting Star by Robert Aickman Midnight Express by Alfred Noyes

This might be the most important book to me among all those I've read. It's certainly, among the four or five horror anthologies I read by the time I was eight, one of only two aimed at adults (the other was the Berkley paperback edited by Hal Cantor, Ghosts and Things), and the one which I remember best (odd how few women's stories were collected in either this or the Cantor, which featured only Shirley Jackson's "The Lovely House" in that wise, though Betty M. Owen's Scholastic Book Services anthologies and the Robert Arthur and Harold Q. Masur Hitchcock anthologies helped redress that balance). Happily for me, perhaps (foolishly) because of the Gorey illustrations, this one was classed in the children's section of the Enfield Central Public Library, where I found it easily enough (not that having to go over to the adult section to find, say, Joan Aiken's collection The Green Flash was any great trial).

This book introduced me to all these geniuses, though of course I'd heard of Sherlock Holmes before reading Doyle's detective-free mummy story here, and had probably seen adaptations of at least some of these folks' works on Night Gallery, or in Bloch's case, his Star Trek scripts, and the George Pal productions of adaptations from that other familiar name, H. G. Wells.

Despite the attempts by some reviewers to claim this book for the ghost story tradition, Mazzeo cast his net considerably wider than that, including revenants other than Doyle's mummy, devils (or at least one Assumes they're devils) in at least one of the wittiest stories here (John Collier lets you know, after all, with his title, and Manly Wade Wellman is only a bit more coy in labeling his tale of a place you don't want to be). M. R. James traps children with a toy, Alfred Noyes with a book; Joseph Payne Brennan, with his best story and one of his shortest, traps the childish, and even H. P. Lovecraft is represented by one of his least self-indulgent stories. Derleth shows what he could do, when not attempting to corrupt Lovecraft's legacy into a Christian metaphor, and Wells's stolen body story is an improvement over the "Elvesham" variation collected by Damon Knight in his The Dark Side. J. B. Priestly, a diverse man of letters, I would next encounter primarily as the author (and reader, for a Spoken Arts recording) of his essay collection DELIGHT, which was indeed delightful; Robert Aickman, while also expert on the waterways of Britain, remained for me and many others the greatest of ghost-story writers of the latter half of the 20th Century, even with Russell Kirk and Joanna Russ and Charles Grant and so many others providing excellent contributions to that literature. That obscure fellow James and E. F. Benson (not yet rediscovered for his comedies of manners, and only one of three prolific Benson brothers in the horror field) were the only writers shared by both this book and the Cantor; the Hodgson is a Carnacki story, a fine introduction to psychic investigators.

And the Gorey illustrations will stay with anyone. This book essentially introduced me to lifelong favorites Bloch, Collier, Benson and Wellman, and even the weakest stories here were rewarding; the Noyes, like the Brennan, is almost certainly the best thing he wrote (at least in prose or the uncanny) and a landmark in the field. I see where Gahan Wilson reviewed this for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1969, Fritz Leiber somewhat belatedly for Fantastic in 1973...I shall have to seek out those reviews...for that matter, I will need to read this book again, eventually, and see how completely all of these have stuck with me. And, as far as I know, Mazzeo never published another book.

One of the pivotal books of my youth, and the first Merril anthology I read, and quite likely the best of its series (of twelve annuals) for its breadth and as good as any and better than most for its consistency of quality.

When I found it in the Nashua, New Hampshire, library, at the Golden Age (13), I already knew of a number of the writers included, and was already several years additcted to Alfred Hitchcock Presents: anthologies, which this fat, somewhat weathered book resembled. I had also happily made my way mostly through one other sf annual, Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss's SF: 71, which was a thinner if no less ambitious and eclectic volume...while in their initial volume, for 1967, Harrison (then the primary editor, with Aldiss advising) ran a credo from Merril's long-term friend and sparring partner James Blish, rather bluntly criticizing both Merril's and the annual series edited by (another ex-Futurian) Donald Wollheim and Terry Carr, the Harrison/Aldiss volumes came increasingly to resemble Merril's, with perhaps even less "traditional" sf and certainly less out-and-out fantasy (for Merril's series, S-F meant "science-fantasy" initially, in its broadest sense...in this 10th volume, she opted instead for her broadest-sense version of Robert Heinlein's old term, "speculative fiction"--basically anything fantasticated in any significant way; fantasy was always a component).

The book was nearly as old as I was, since its contents were (largely) drawn from first publication (at least in English) in the year of my birth, 1964, and those contents by and large impressed me and broadened my horizons (certainly Mack Reynolds's "Pacifist" had an effect on my thinking about as profound as Joe Gores's "The Second Coming"...which I read in an AHP: volume). Several others came close: I was young enough not to find the metaphor of Kit Reed's automatic tiger too heavy-handed, while old enough to know that one of Richard Wilson's characters, a more experienced Vice President who had been passed over for a relatively callow Presidential candidate, was an analog for the not yet disappointing LBJ (and Wilson's story written and set in type no doubt before the events of November '63). J. G. Ballard, who just died this past weekend, challenged me; Roger Zelazny dazzled me (though I had seen his story already, in Robert Silverberg and the SFWA's The SF Hall of Fame), Frank Roberts sobered me (and might not've published much more fiction; my Australian friends and acquaintances are unaware of much else, nor is the web), Donald Hall, whose poetry has been his major passion, charmed me. (The recently late) Thomas Disch's heavy metaphor was just as effective as Reed's or Hall's; Larry Eisenberg's broad comedy was almost as funny as Hall's subtler story and Becker's sly parodies, and Rick Raphael's amiable telekineis fantasy as much fun as David Bunch's grimly funny family psychodrama (if even Bunch not as grim as Nesvaba nor Romain Gary, Raphael not in the same league with Singer for the sense of life...Merril, btw, chose to render the characters' names in the title of "Jachid and Jechidna" in more goy/English-friendly transliteration--surprised she didn't opt for "Yackid"). While nineteen of the stories are from magazines devoted to sf and fantasy, and only three from relatively eclectic little magazines (assuming Coast to Coast was an Australian general-interest magazine of some sort, and counting Harper's as not quite Little), their presence, along with the selections taken from collections (albeit at least one, I don't have my copy at hand to check which but perhaps the Roberts, the slightly older Farrell, or the cancer-fantasy by Gironella, first read by Merril in the then-new newsstand magazine Short Story International) and such odd places as The Call, gave this and other of Merril's later annuals a sense of eclecticism that many readers found over-broad; some of those were also put off by Merril's running commentary in the books, wrapped around the stories and joining them, sometimes more effectively than other times, in a common purpose, even if only to suggest that the literary approaches in the 1960s within the fantastic fiction community and without were pretty much on par and often focused on the same developments in human events. Which, as the fiction collected here, and in her other anthologies, usually demonstrated, and in part was due to her efforts. And those of such magazine editors as Fantastic and Amazing's Cele Lalli, not long before Ziff-Davis sold her magazines out from under her, and she went on to edit Z-D bridal magazines for the rest of her career, and F&SF's Avram Davidson, not long before he had to give up his run as that magazine's best editor due to the untenable postal connection between the NYC offices and his home-office first in Mexico, then in Guyana. (Merril very happy about Short Story International, as well, then in its shorter, earlier run; by 1978, it had been revived and up and running for several years, just waiting on a well-stocked newsstand for me to discover it, and read it whenever I could find it, along with Fantastic and F&SF and Hitchcock's and Ellery Queen's issues then, and now (though Fantastic is gone again, after a brief revival, though Weird Tales and Cemetery Dance and particularly Realms of Fantasy, which we are told is not-dead-just-resting, have taken the space Fantastic used to hold), and Zoetrope All-Story is perhaps the closest current newsstand approach to SSI, which left us again in the 1990s.

Merril's volumes weren't the first annual series in Speculative Fiction (that fell to E. F. Bleiler and Ted Ditky, with August Derleth making a brief run at it as well), but from 1956 on they helped set the tone more than anyone else's, then or since, even Carr and Wollheim either together or (as they were for most of the 1970s) separately, or Gardner Dozois and his competitors in sf, and the imrpessive array of fantasy and horror annuals. led by veterans Ellen Datlow and Stephen Jones, today.

Bent my twig, certainly. Even moreso than it was already.

For more of this Friday's "forgotten" books, please see Patti Abbott's blog, and the blogroll links she has...this "meme"'s been going on for a year, and even if she didn't get my tripartite FFB post into the archive yet, she's done an impressive job of motivation and organization through some tough times. I thank her for her efforts, and am proud to continue to contribute and to have offered other small service...

So, you want to talk noir...if there's a concept in "darkness" that can be as argued about and misconstrued as noir, it's probably "black humor." Grotesquerie, biting satire, modest proposals. This book is a handsome sample of what was available in 1962, assembled by the writer best remembered for The Man with the Golden Arm, but who should be remembered for a much wider range of work, including the story that he immodestly caps this anthology with. As with Joe David Bellamy's SuperFiction from a decade later or Dwight Macdonald's fat Parodies from a couple of years before, this has been a widely-distributed anthology touching on the fantastic and the grimly realistic, surfiction and some stuff that at least verges on metafiction. Saul Bellow, not usually thought of as a comic writer (though his wit was just one of his many facets) delivers what might be the slightest and lightest piece here; Hughes Rudd, in the 1970s the acerbic anchor of the CBS Morning News (which was actually more or less a news program, imagine) gives him a run for that laurel (any joking aside, CBS News had several fictioneers on staff in those years, including Reid Collins on the radio side). George Elliott's "Among the Dangs" is straight-up science fiction enough to have been reprinted in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction before its appearance here, and Pynchon's "Entropy" might've been squeezed in without too much forcing the issue. The Heller is from a fine, pioneering Lion Books all-originals paperback anthology, and Joan Kerchoff probably shouldn't be the only woman to be represented in the book (how many Dororthy Parkers did he pass by? No Mary McCarthy?), but it's a solid, grimly funny read (and not only grimly funny) under either of the titles Lancer Books, that ultimately doomed publisher, chose to reissue it (Bernard Geis Associates did the hardcover, which I've never seen). Somebody else should; it's been gone too long.

We have here two unreprinted shorter works, as far as I can tell...and I have no good idea why they weren't ever given another shot at finding their audiences. The Scott is cut down from her first novel to about a 40K-word novella, edited into its current form by Escapade editor Barry Malzberg in a marathon session that, if I remember correctly, halved its length (and was so down to the wire that the paste-up manages to repeat a few paragraphs and puts a page or so slightly out of order). It's still a compelling, possibly somewhat autobiographical account of a young woman, unwilling to fit anyone else's expectations of what her behavior or aspirations should be, but not any less insecure for that, and with a keen sense for what sort of bullshitters of all stripes (student radicals, burnouts, artists, businesspeople, et al.) surround her on and around the Berkeley campus on the cusp of the repression of the Free Speech Movement and what followed. Having such a keen sense doesn't keep her from falling for a bullshitter or two, mind you. None of the adorableness of The Catcher in the Rye, much less The Strawberry Statement, here...a lot of the people around her are playing for high stakes, and usually not fairly...even when the stakes involve putting up with them till one's soul shrivels. And there's no stalking away in morally superior dudgeon, either, for her...there is realization of the kinds of compromises we all make with each other, institutions, life.Jody Scott sporadically published further fiction, including two novels released in book form...Malzberg recommends them here, from a column of "forgotten" and curious items in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Donald Westlake was also an iconoclast, albeit one who played the game in the publishing world more sustainedly. Like Scott, not one to suffer fools gladly in his fiction, he offers here a charming if slightly improbable romantic road story, in which a a capable young woman can't quite figure out her ambivalence toward marrying her fiance, who awaits her arrival from NYC to LA with her yes or no. Being picked up by a gentle and Mostly pro-feminist cabbie, himself a youngish dropout (31 to her 29) from the fast lane who now pushes a hack for his father's small company, she has a brainstorm...rather than fly across country, and have to make up her mind and formulate her reasons in six or seven hours, she hires the cabbie to driver her across country, giving her a week to get her thoughts in order. Along the way, they run into a not too surprising but well-described set of circumstances, including a demonstration of how important her position is that gets them into a discussion of class and sex that unnerves them both, and a growing mutual attraction despite their best efforts otherwise. Her decision leaves her in a position not altogether unlike that of Scott's protagonist, but much more sure of herself and far happier, if not unalloyedly so...this notion of not conforming to other's expectations and desires has its cost, even if the fiancee and the cabbie, at story's end, will likely be at least friends going forward.Westlake makes notably much of how similar to the point of identical Holiday Inns in the late '70s were to each other, so I have to wonder if this not altogether flattering product placement (it never occurs to them to stop at a Ramada nor a Quality Inn) wasn't a means of ensuring a roadtrip by Westlake might be written off taxwise as research. But, as I mentioned, it's a charming story, with only one brief bit of too-cute comedy that Westlake occasionally indulged in in his early work, the rest up to his usual standards of amused, sharp observation. Perhaps Westlake thought his "novel" (as Redbook calls it) was too explicitly tailored to a romance-oriented audience, or perhaps he thought he might expand it further (though it's hard to see how it would profitably go beyond the 25K words or so of its current novelet state), or just wouldn't fit in among his more criminous short fiction in his relatively few collections. [Late bulletin (2012): Apparently, Westlake wrote this one up as a filmscript or at least as a treatment, and there might well be an actual novel-length manuscript version among his papers, as well.]They are both awaiting rediscovery...the woman writer's sharply critical condemnation of human exploitation in a men's skin magazine (albeit a sophisticated one), and the man's slightly but not altogether more muted tribute to untraditional values and feminist and pro-feminist masculist aspiration in a fairly traditional women's domestic-life magazine (albeit one with a proud and, for at least some years further, sustained tradition of offering fiction, including ambitious fiction, long after most of the competition had dropped same. Albeit a "novel" as long as Westlake's, even when written by a writer of his stature, was presented in microprint in the back pages of the issue.)You could do much worse.See Patti Abbott's blog for links to other "forgotten stories" for this week. And thanks to Barry and Joe for letting me among others know of the existence of these stories, and providing copies of them.

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Mason index to this anthology, which features representative selections arranged in chronological order, within a rough approximation of the magazine's format, down to separating the contents by the language they were written in:

Botteghe Oscure was a semiannual little magazine published and mostly edited by Marguerite Caetani from 1948-1960 from the street Botteghe Oscure ("dark shops" or "dark bodegas") in Rome. It was very well-funded by her, and while it favored poetry also ran some interesting prose, not least in other languages, as each issue by design featured new writing in English, French, and Italian in discrete segments, followed in alternating issues by either Spanish or German sections, and a scattering of translations from ancient languages and others. Apparently most though not all the materials had English translations, but sadly for me this volume doesn't feature translations of the foreign-language texts (with the exceptions of the Char poetry, where the translations were the new component in that issue), so the French and German are mostly only a little better than Greek to me, since I can guess at the cognates in a Roman alphabet (I can stagger through the Spanish and take stabs at the Italian). It published 25 issues, plus a number of supplements, and the most famous piece of work in English it introduced is almost certainly Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night." Included, of course.

Substitute for the original blog entry:Well, having cleverly erased my several paragraphs about this fine anthology, taken from the major little magazine which flourished from 1948-1960 and was published semi-annually and generally edited by the passionate and well-heeled Marguerite Caetani, I will attempt to reconstruct my entry tomorrow, when I get a chance.

One thing I made a point of mentioning--along with an impressive array of the best writers in English, Spanish, Italian, French and German, among other languages, but those five regularly, this is the magazine that first gave the world Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"--naturally, among the works included here. And Caetani paid her contributors well...at a time when Harper's Bazaar might pay a poet $75 a poem, and such less-endowed magazines as The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly some fraction of that, she was known to offer $300 out of pocket to the likes of Marianne Moore or William Stafford or Walter de la Mare or ee cummings or Wallace Stevens or such prose contributors as Elizabeth Bowen and Robert Graves.

A sampler reflective of the way the magazine was put together rather than a Best-of, including the originals but no translations (unlike the magazine) of then new (often in-progress) works by Albert Camus, Gunter Grass, Octavio Paz, Carlo Levi, and other non-Anglophone contributors, as well...making this the only Forgotten book I'll cite where I can't read a fair amount of it at all, or only the cognates in the French and German...while I can stumble through the Spanish and make a stab at the Italian...

For more Forgotten books, see Patti Nase Abbott's blog, where she sparks and organizes this weekly adventure (three cheers!).